The Nexus 6 is the latest flagship from the folks over at Google and Motorola. Packing Android 5.0.1 Lollipop and the best hardware available, it is a serious device but with great devices there are always some surprises. Good or bad, all devices have them! Find out what sort of surprises the Nexus 6 gave to Marco Hanna in the video above!
I’ve been using the Motorola Nexus 6 for the past four months as my daily driver. The Nexus 6 has been one of those devices where I had such high expectations to it but sadly it didn’t live up to all of them. There have been a few surprises along the way: some good and some bad. Let’s check out a few of them on this installment of the Nexus 6 challenge.
The Nexus 6 is a flagship from the labs of Motorola and Google. It’s running the latest software available, the Android 5.0 Lollipop and has some of the best hardware around from early November 2014. It’s also a huge phone. With nearly 6-inch display, the Nexus 6 is one large behemoth. When this thing was first announced, I thought to myself there was no way I could use it. I already had an experience with the iPhone 6 Plus and that phone was really pushing the boundary of what is big.
My first surprise was actually how comfortable this phone was to use and that has to do with the Motorola design on the Nexus 6. It follows the second generation Moto X with its curved and rounded back. It feels like the device is really sitting on your hand.
The next surprise was the display. AMOLED technology is great and Samsung has been using the technology for a very long time. The ability to power the display with no backlight is great because it delivers the deepest blacks. But something about the Nexus 6 display just wasn’t exactly right. I mainly blame the Galaxy Note 4 for having the best mobile display around. The Nexus 6 was not very color-accurate and everything seemed a little too warm. For example, the whites looked more like a yellow.
Next up is the speakers. While Motorola has been putting front-facing speakers on a few of its devices, they have not exactly wowed me with sound quality. The Nexus 6 has dual stereo speakers on the front and they sound fairly good actually. Sounds better than the Moto X, which only had one speaker in front and it sounded a ton better than the Moto G with its similar stereo speakers set-up. But can I say it beats HTC’s Boom sound speakers? No. Not at all.
Next up is software. Now I really can’t call this a surprise because I’ve already liked Android before but this Lollipop software version of Android is by far, the best mobile operating system around. It’s fluid, it’s fast, it looks pretty damn good and it feels really fresh. Unlike previous versions of Android, which were really just improvements of the last generation of Android.
Also, the camera surprised me—in a bad way. While Motorola never really had the best phone cameras, I was hoping for an increase in quality from the less expensive Moto X second generation. It’s a slightly different sensor but the quality is identical. And surely, it’s not the best. 4K video is average at best as well.
My biggest surprise while using the Nexus 6 as my daily driver, well you probably already guessed it: battery life. I think I’ve ranted on this enough. Its huge 3220 mAh battery in less than four hours of on-screen time isn’t acceptable in my book. Even if it means switching the extra pixels and shrinking the display size.
Really, that’s about it. I hope you enjoyed watching this video. Make sure to leave your comment below.